I’ve always found photos of star trails — the arcs the stars paint across the sky as the earth turns — fascinating. They’re one of the things that we can “see” with a camera that we can’t see with our eyes. Technology has changed how we shoot star trails, making star trail shots in locations we previously thought impossible possible.Read more…

MELVILLE, N.Y., March 26, 2015 – A 37-year-old man has criticized Canon’s latest DSLR, the 5DS, for not having enough pixels, even though it has more pixels than any other DSLR in history and has not even been released yet.Read more…

Last week SpaceX posted its photos to Flickr and released them to the public domain. Unfortunately for the company, Flickr didn’t have any public domain designation they could use, so even though SpaceX founder Elon Musk said the photos were public domain, the images were shared under a Creative Commons license that required attribution.

That has now changed. Flickr announced yesterday that it has created two new options for members in the copyright dropdown panel: public domain and CC0, which allows users to release content to the public domain.Read more…

Short-film makers Adrian Morphy and Marissa Bergougnou of Rhymes with Orange did an interesting little social experiment recently. They had a guy named Geoffrey Cork stand on a street and ask passersby to stop and pose for a selfie with him. It wasn’t just a smartphone selfie, though, but also one shot with a bulky 16mm Bolex motion picture camera. The black-and-white cinematic selfies turned out pretty well.

Ryan McGinnis is a photographer and storm chaser whom we interviewed and featured back in 2011. After years of pointing his camera at newsworthy storms, McGinnis switched things up a bit in 2014 by introducing time-lapses into his repertoire. Although he was still learning, he did manage to capture quite a few amazing sequences showing powerful weather events.

The 4.5-minute video above, titled “2014 Stormlapses,” is a highlight reel McGinnis put together to share his best time-lapse sequences.Read more…

Professional photographer Leif Norman recently gave a talk at TEDxManitoba titled “The Past and Future of Photography.” Norman spent 18 minutes giving the audience a brief history of photography and sharing Gladys, a large format view camera he built to experiment with older processes.

One of his recent discoveries was that he could scan a 4×5 calotype negative and turn it into a high quality 120 megapixel digital photograph. Gladys is therefore the equivalent of a 820 megapixel camera.

A 87-year-old grandmother in Texas has sold a rare and valuable collection of more than 500 Civil War-era photographs to the Library of Congress after building her personal collection for four decades.Read more…